Guest role
The guest account
Moodle has a built-in "Guest account". Visitors can log in as guests using the "Login as a guest" button on the login screen and enter any courses which allow guest access. In addition, logged-in users can enter any courses which allow guest access without being required to enrol.
Guests ALWAYS have "read-only" access - meaning they can't leave any posts or otherwise mess up the course for real students.
They cannot:
- Post in forums
- Edit wiki pages
- Participate in a chat
- Take quizzes
- Submit assignments
- Add glossary or database activity entries or comments
- Receive any scores or grades (because of the read-only access)
This feature can be handy when you want to let a colleague in to look around at your work, or to let students see a course before they have decided to enrol.
If you want guests to be able to take quizzes, or any of the other activities listed above, and have considered the security implications, you can create a visitor account, say with username = password = visitor, for everyone to share.
Enabling guest access
To allow guests into courses on your Moodle, see Guest access
Skip login page by URL
When you need a URL for external people to view your Moodle pages which allow guest access, you can add to one simple URL parameter username=guest to skip login page and automatically login these users as Guests.
For example, this URL will ask the user to login before display Welcome page of the "Using Moodle" course:
But this URL will log the visitor in as Guest and display the requested page immediately:
Note: if user tries to go to login directly from the page opened by this URL, he can't do it because the login page will return him to that URL and relogin as Guest again. It can be frustrating, and because of this, use this method only in links for external visitors.
See also
Using Moodle forum discussions:
